There is no other way to say it: It was a political assassination. Osama bin Laden was unarmed. SEALs captured him alive. Following brazenly illegal orders from Washington, they executed him. "The [Obama] administration had made clear to the military's clandestine Joint Special Operations Command that it wanted bin Laden dead," The Atlantic reported on May 4, 2011.
State-controlled media outlets like The Atlantic claimed that U.S. President Barack Obama was desperate to avoid a trial that would give the al-Qaida leader a "high-profile platform for spreading his extremist views." Left unsaid, as so much is in the American steno-journalism reminiscent of the Soviet Union, was a more pressing reason to silence the Saudi scion.
As much as the families of 9/11 victims craved justice, it was infinitely more important to the U.S. political establishment to deny bin Laden an opportunity to publicly expound on his ties to the CIA and the CIA-funded Pakistani intelligence agency Inter-Services Intelligence when they were training and funding the "Afghan Arabs" who fought Soviet occupation forces in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Letting people learn that 9/11 would likely never have happened if not for the CIA would have been awkward.